looks like many of you, when talking about proprietary software, see this scenario:
"an evil super-big corporation (we'll use a fake name for it: Autodesk, or Microsoft) steal or abuse Blender, and get away with it. They make lots of money they don't deserve, our beloved developers get pissed, our users gain nothing? No way!" well, I would hate that, too! But in our computer graphics industry (games, animation, vfx) I don't really see this "THEM (evil moneymakers) vs. US (passionate community)" thing... let me try and give you another perspective on this, based on my professional experience ;) Who's THEM? All over the world there are hundreds of CG studios, ranging from very big (~2000 staff) to very small (~20 staff). It is my opinion that, however strange it might seem, most of the people involved with CG actually _work_ in such a place. You may prove me wrong on this, but CG is so demanding that most of us end up making a living of it to keep it going. :) There are of course artists/developers doing graphics out of fun besides a full-time job/school in an unrelated field, but not as many as full-timers (and you know what? For the most part we love it so much that we work on personal CG stuff in our spare time besides a full-time job in a studio! Check forums where professionals hang out). How is life in a studio? Guys, it is AWESOMENESS! Really, you should see it. A bunch of crazy, _highly_ skilled, _highly_ experienced people crunching ideas, building tools, experimenting on everything, sometimes fighting, getting stressed and overworked, chilling out with pizza and beer in the evening (usually late, late evening), and generally having loads of fun! ;) And all this to go to the theater, watching people watch your work and laugh, cry, think, and then feeling so proud when your name comes up on the screen for a microsecond in the credits and no one but you notice it! Of course studios are companies, too, and so they try to make money. But in the end, as my boss said just yesterday, making images is all we are about! So, are they really THEM? To me they definitely look like US, just maybe not using Blender, yet! How is this related to this thread? Typically in a studio we tend to develop many small or not so small things around our base tools, based on the needs of each "show" (a game, a movie, a commercial...), but usually there is not enough time to polish them, document them, etc. Remember? We are about making images, not software. And besides there will never be enough resources to develop everything you need, so you go for the big target, what makes your studio unique, and integrate third-party tools for what you don't have resources to develop yourself, or is better done by someone else, or is somehow secondary to you. And where do this third party tools come from? >From everywhere, really. Look at the Maya eco-system for example. Even if proprietary, Maya is in a way a very open software: stable APIs for plugins, lots of documentation and examples, good support. You can build amazing stuff around it, I'm sure you've all seen interesting making-ofs and the like. This means that MANY developers distribute their Maya plugins, scripts, or just ideas as open source or public domain. And some software companies (often spinoffs from some studio) develop bigger plugins as proprietary code and sell them. For studios this is very important: I have my base tool and I love it, but if I get a show that needs photorealistic fur, or smoke, or a special renderer, and I can't do it myself, can I get it from someone else? If I have time I could pay developers to do it from scratch, but what if I don't have time? The best option would be buying an already-made, already-tested-in-production plugin. And if at some point all of my shows will require smoke, then I'll develop something myself... This is really what "commercial" software means in our context. And we have a very bright example that having a tool that can be extended means that a lot of people will extend it: Blender Add-ons! With the add-on system, Blender development is skyrocketing with small and useful things! Couldn't all this things be done in the code before? Sure they could, but it would have been more difficult for someone not knowing Blender internals, would have required centralized management (stealing Ton's time), and would have ended up as low priority projects in the tracker. Instead look at how many add-ons we have now! And it's just the beginning. Now if we just made some more steps in that direction... - give people a chance to make proprietary add-ons and plugins, so if they need to invest money they can. - build a more powerful plugin system with stable APIs and good docs. The license is just a part of it. For the second point, think how cool it would be if things like Dynamic Paint, the Ocean modifier, or all the awesome stuff from Raul could be done as external plugins. No need to get core developers to review, approve and integrate it, no wasting of their time. No pain for plugins developers to keep their patches in sync with trunk waiting for integration (SoC anyone?), no need for super-deep, ever-changing knowledge of blender internals required. How many Dynamic Paints would we see with a stable plugin API? How many Ocean modifiers? 2010/11/25 José Romero <jose.cyb...@gmail.com> > > Blender is a tool for artists, not programmers. > I don't really see this in my experience. Programmers build tools for artists, artists inspire programmers to build tools. And there's no such distinction as artist vs. programmer. In a studio it's a very blurred line, with lots of people being on both sides. What is good for the pipeline, is good for everybody. _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list Bf-committers@blender.org http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers